So many of the people I worked with when I worked in long-term psychiatric care had spent many years in state hospitals and then wound up in our institutions, usually because they were too ill to cope and ended up homeless and then they'd wind up in the system somehow (jail, food stamps, shelters, etc) and be placed with us. It was really hard seeing some of the things that resulted from their experiences and hearing the stories they'd share. I started working there only a couple years after their last lobotomy patient died. Once when searching storage for a restraint (something I hated but had to do for some patients) the nurse who was helping me and I found a straight jacket that had somehow survived all the years since those had been used and was stuffed in the back of a box. I hated doing any restraints although it was part of my job so I did it, but it was impossible to imagine putting someone in that thing.

Some of the people I worked with had spent their entire adult lives in institutions-jail, state facilities, and ultimately with us. They had little concept of what the world now was like because they experienced only if they were allowed to go to McDonald's or Walmart occasionally. It was so hard or some of them to trust that they'd get enough food or that people were not going to hurt them. And while the place I worked wasn't perfect those weren't issues there; they were issues that came from other places. They made it so much more real and it added greatly to my hospital phobia which was a big issue for quite a while because I was terrified of being hospitalized and so refused it. I finally accepted it when I was going to start an MAOI and going IP was the only way to do that safely since I was a mess before I was even tapered off the old med, much less before I could have waited out 2 weeks to avoid interactions which the hospital let me avoid. I was ok about it then and it hasn't been so bad because I got to a special mood disorders unit that is about as good as it gets. But I'm not sure I'll ever get past the stories of the patients who had such horrible experiences for many years of their lives. The worst things I've had to contend with in IP have been a nurse who I had some conflict with and the dr deemed I was correct which she hasn't forgotten (but my dr says lots of people don't like her), a social worker who doesn't follow through on what she promises she will, and 24 hours of line of site observation that meant I didn't get to sleep because the door had to be wide open and it was noisy and bright. And compared to the stories I've heard that is absolutely nothing.